Michelle Wu, Mayor of Boston, believes “every human-being has the legal right to come to the United States”: Michelle Wu as a biographical-ideological study of the U.S. elite in the 2020s

A woman by the name of “Michelle Wu” is, for some reason, the mayor of the City of Boston.

Michelle Wu’s ideas on what America “is” and what America is “for” are worth some analysis and commentary, which is what this essay will be. The questions we seek to answer are: “Who is Michelle Wu, how did she get where she is, what makes her think the way she does, and what is she ‘up to’?”

Included will be substantial biographical-investigation elements into the origins and political-career of Michelle Wu, and what these things have to say about the state of the U.S. elite in our time.

Before adding another word of further comment, let me quote the remarks made about immigration-and-nationality policy, delivered by Michelle Wu on May 12, 2023. Quote:

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“Every person, every human being, has the legal right to come to the United States and seek asylum, or shelter. Those policies have been in place for a long time.

…[As for the ‘process’ that allows for a] ‘pathway’ to stay, and/or work-authorization that comes along with that: when that process is so drawn out, people are stuck. They are looking to work, looking to contribute, looking to be in a safe democracy where they can raise their families.

We, at the city level, are now dealing with many of the impacts of the processes [that have] people ‘falling through the cracks’ at the federal level. We’re working very closely with the state.

This is affecting municipalities across [Massachusetts]. [We are trying to] ‘triage’ the situation, to create temporary housing so that families can get settled.”

[End quote from “Michelle Wu,” Mayor of Boston, on Boston Public Radio, May 12, 2023; see timestamp 14:48.]

While these comments might be called “tone-deaf,” they are better seen as a “triumphalist,” braggadocio-tinged assertion of a “post-American future.”

Waves of Migrants, we hear, have “the legal right” — or is that really the “moral duty”? — to “settle” permanently in the USA. There are around 6,000,000,000 (six billion) people living in conditions poorer than those they could get in the United States.

Regular-American types, the non-Diverse people, which is to say second-class subjects, are to be swamped by waves of Migrants. They must subsidize the sacred Migrants. I have called this process and ideology and this whole system a “demographic pyramid-scheme.” Here I want to focus on something else: the role of who is doing this, overseeing this, backing this, and why. Michelle Wu declares herself for it, so let’s examine what’s going on with her.

This policy and ideology of no-limit migration is one without clear or rational bounds. It can, and does, benefit certain aspirant or established elites, both its implementation and its advocacy. Supposed natural-elites and moral-entrepreneurs, like Michelle Wu, are legitimized by these policies and views. Words of compassion are spoken, but they mask elite-competition. They also form an important part of the “class consciousness” of the new U.S. elite. Michelle Wu is a typical member of this new elite, as we shall see in the rest of this essay.

We hear from Michelle Wu that these Migrants — who just want to “raise their families” in a “safe democracy”,” she says — are a-okay and positive-net-good contributors, even if they are lifetime-net-tax-and-resource consumers. She says she is using city funds to house them and get them permanently “settled.” This sounds like a great deal for them, for the Migrants. But, as we shall see, the benefits of this thing also apply to herself, to Michelle Wu, a woman who has greatly benefitted from the Diversity system and the Wokeness coalition.

Free housing and other support, and implied guarantees of permanent-residency or citizenship down the line, represents a mega-program overseen and mediated by the Good People, like Michelle Wu. They run this system. It is actually an irrational system, even a cruel one. It harms the natives and, after a certain point, it directly harms and undermines the commons, that is to say the common good.

What this “immigrationism” mega-program really means is a consumption of the resources developed by us, resources that constitute the social commons. These policies and attitudes are overtly harmful to the commons. At the levels and in the ways we have seen happening in the early 2020s, it is hardly some mystery. So why would the elite of a society be all “for” something like this, especially in such an unqualified way?

I find Michelle Wu’s remarks here (including specific wording and delivery) to be revealing about the U.S.-elite and its attitudes. What the elite thinks, what it does, who it’s composed of, how it sees itself and its place, what it sees as its (separate) destiny, how it sees its duties in the realm of the political and vis-a-vis the non-elite.

I have written about “U.S. elite attitudes on immigration” before: See, e.g., “The USA’s Guiding Maxim on Immigration” [April 2023] and its follow-up, “On ‘Immigrationism’ ideology, its future, and elite-dissent” [May 2023]. On the nature of the U.S. elite, see: “America’s ruling class, early 2020s” [Dec. 2021]. On the role of Asians in the U.S. elite or aspirant elite, see: “On the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), its turn towards Wokeness, the OSF Board, and the role of Asians in the USA” [May 2023]. This essay revisits all these themes. Michelle Wu’s personal origins are necessary to analyze before a discussion of her remarks is possible. From it we get something of a fresh approach to the classic studies on the U.S. elite, what it is, what it does, how it works, and related matters.

I can also add this parenthetical comment on style and presentation of Michelle Wu’s “delivery” of these remarks — and these things are to be sure, matters are relevant to any study the elite of any time or place:

We hear from Michelle Wu a moderately-unpleasant degree of “vocal fry.” She delivered her “post-national, post-American triumphalist” statement-of-principles with a range other odd mannerisms and turns-of-phrase. The whole may be characterizable as a mix of four things:

(1.) empty-slogans;

(2.) “virtue-signals,” which are lobbed into the intellectual-commons like so many grenades. Out of these virtue-signal grenades comes shrapnel of power-display, intimidation of opponents, and something that one may take for love (and, functionally, in that order);

(3.) a cultivated degree of deceptive-bubbleheadness, characteristic of her type. This, however, masks a kind of cruelty of moral-purpose; and

(4.) a liberal use of “academic-ese.”

He who wishes to see the original video of Mayor Michelle Wu’s remarks may find the link to do so (Boston Public Radio, May 12, 2023; see timestamp 14:48). Note that it was broadcast during one of her regular interviews with the powerful left-wing institution that is Boston Public Radio. We here at Hail To You deal in the medium of text. We try to focus specifically on contents over style. For that reason, I’ve rendered the relevant portion of her remarks into pure text form.

The statements that Michelle Wu makes, unplanned as they are, reveal her true thoughts in a delightful way. As a bonafide and well-vetted member of the “post-national, anything-goes, Big-Blue elite,” we should pay attention to what she says. We should take it as reflective of U.S. elite-ideology on demographic-and-nationality policy. Michelle Wu is herself of recent-migrant origin. She probably does believe (in) her own words here. The ideology behind her words empowers her, and those like her. So it is self-serving. Concession is quite impossible to the White-Christian majority, to the historic founding-stock, to the national core-population (which still does basically shape U.S. culture, society, economy, and a range of institutions and mores; a hostile-elite overseeing the whole notwithstanding).

What does the elite really think about Migrants? The Migrants are at once to be used instrumentally as pawns, as tools, as warm-bodies in a never-ending Drang Nach Virtue. It is a drive that concurrently and conveniently undermines the White-Christian core-population and tamps down on provincial brushfires before they can spread.

In this way, the smiling-and-often-semi-bubbleheadedly-delivered ideology can take care of those troublesome people out there. The ones in the scary-psychological realm that is Middle America. The ones who get disrespected, dismissed, mocked, talked-down to, from those on-high on the cultural-political heights.

The uncompromising and breezily-ethnic-cleansing-supportive attitude by the U.S. elite towards what it sees as a problematic portion of its own population: it seems similar to Israel’s attitude towards the Palestinians. It’s an interesting comparison that we get test a little further.

Consider Israel’s current plans for mass-expulsions of Palestinians out of Gaza as an analog to Michelle Wu’s attitude that the U.S. population is just a shamble unworthy of any kind of defense or even moral-legitimacy as such. (The Israel plan, is according to reliable reports out of the mainstream Israel press at this time of writing. The reports quote Israeli government officials, who hope to see most Palestinians removed from Gaza permanently: “The world should support humanitarian emigration [of Palestinians], because that’s the only solution I know,” the Times of Israel quotes a senior government minister, Gila Gamliel.) In case you lost the thread as that analogy was being weaved, I’ll restate it directly: We are the Palestinians. Those who hold the whip-hand declare that for their opponents or rivals to surrender is really the only humanitarian solution, for “us” to rule and for “you” to cede the way for others. They enforce this extremist thinking.)

This same sort of ideology, alas, rules over all of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. But all those places are under the influence of the United States. All those places and beyond are under the heavy influence of people who live and breathe the anti-national ideology that we see from Michelle Wu’s mental world. It is a rather-crazy and extreme ideology. That is to say, when it’s examined in the light of day, or when it’s stated “a little too on-the-nose” as Michelle Wu did here. But it seems to be adapted and reapplied to every other Western society.

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A thought-experiment for you: Why not apply Michelle Wu’s nationality-policy to her native Taiwan? Would she?

Given-1: PRC-Chinese want to “take” Taiwan. Given-2: the diktats of humanitarian-ethics compel countries to “accept every human-being” who has “a legal right” to dispossess that which they want to “take.” Michelle Wu seeks to force this kind of ethnomasochistic-moral-paradigm on White-Americans. Does not the spirit of fairness and logic compel us, under our rules of Western fair-play(to include “turnabout”), to also say that PRC-China has every “legal right” to take Taiwan?

Is Michelle Wu an absolutist on this? Does she believe Taiwan has no right to exist since PRC-Chinese want to “take” it? Or does her political-philosophy only apply to the USA, and she is actually for the coherence and continuity of Taiwan-independence after all? A dilemma! If she is consistent in her anti-national views, would she have the courage of her alleged convictions here?

Picture Michelle Wu getting off a plane and beginning to shout at people, the start of her scolding-tour of the old homeland: Listen, all you crazy-and-bigoted Taiwanese people: Just give up on independence and accept these people who want to associate with you. Don’t be bad people. Don’t be like bad-guy racists or bigoted according to nationality. Just let the PRC-occupiers come, and also give them large amounts of taxpayer resources. It’s not your concern if PRC-China then annexes Taiwan; that’s immoral to even think about. I am Michelle Wu, and I have spoken.

Would she return home to Taiwan to do that line of moral-scolding, that kind of bizarre political-moralistic lecture to her country-people?

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Let me be bold here and say that it is our fate to eventually retake control of our own destiny. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that our people are to be free.

The changes of future times will have to come through a change within the elite, or the rise of a “dissident elite” that eventually replaces the incumbent elite. Things still seems to look dark. But the outlines of our liberation are already visible.

Some sense of that kind of future — in which Western Mankins retakes control of its own destiny — is one reason why the Michelle Wu types of the world are so harridan-like in their insistence on the opposite. Some intimation of its inevitably; some hazy vision, even, of the moral-rightness thereof and the power that flows therefrom. These are powerful images that clearly do cause the current elite apprehension. This apprehension explains a lot about what they do, and what types of figures get promoted by the Regime — such as, for one, Michelle Wu.

We next turn to Michelle Wu’s origins and how she entered the U.S. elite. After that, we shall return to the question of the current elite-ideology and elite composition in the early- (soon to be “mid”-) 21st century. These things are keystones of our collective near-term destiny for as long as this system remains. You may not want it to be the case that someone like Michelle Wu is an “elite” over U.S. society, but it’s a systemic thing and the system does want it. That she is such an implausible member of the elite of any given society makes her all the more interesting a case-study.

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On the origins of “Michelle Wu,” her weak ties to the United States, and her rise to power in the 2010s

Born in 1985, Michelle Wu was born as the daughter of English-deficient parents who had then-recently arrived from Taiwan.

It is said that Michelle Wu’s father had been offered a slot at a graduate school of technology in Illinois, sometime in the early 1980s. The father of Michelle Wu was given a student visa. He held such a visa at the time of Michelle Wu’s birth in 1985. She could be classified as “anchor-baby,” in the sense that her parents were neither permanent legal residents nor citizens at the time of her birth. Because of hostile control over U.S. demographic policy, the whole of them — daughter and parents — were, in effect, granted instant-permission to stay in the USA forever. And benefit from the culture and institutions created and maintained by others (the core-population, the founding- and institution-shaping population).

An entire network \exists to facilitate the “permanently-staying-forever” aspirations of even those who don’t have “anchor babies.” If one has an ‘in’ with members of this type of foreign community in the USA, one can easily meet versions of these people. People who, by hook or by crook, have managed to stay forever and somehow obtain U.S. citizenship. Often this is through the help of loophole-finding “immigration lawyers” (a strange but commonly-seen site in many Big-Blue metropolitan areas).

It’s worth reiterating that Michelle Wu’s parents were not given “immigrant visas” when they arrived. The terms of the visa, strictly speaking, were for a course of study. A student-visa is not an immigrant-visa. If the intention from the start was to stay forever, it was a form of visa-fraud. The very division of such categories seems a little silly, and stressing the point seems pedantic, because it so often happens this way. In other words, the U.S. “immigration system” (really, demographic and nationality policy) is loose and easily exploitable by those willing to do so. (These are points worth spelling out to Westerners, given our thinking-style. Our world tends to revolve around respect for rules and norms as such. But, generally speaking, the rest of the world doesn’t.)

Despite ostensibly coming to study, Mr. Wu and family never actually left the United States. It’s also worth stating that many countries would encourage, or even outright require, a student-visa recipient to leave, in almost all cases. But the USA was intoxicated on a loose-immigration policy in those days. (See, e.g., “Who Lost California?” [2019].) This loose-immigration policy form a core part of the creed of an political-theology which has produced a large, galvanized-and-aggressive class of ideological-commissars. (See, e.g., “Who Radicalized Heidi Beirich?” and “Who Radicalized Robin DiAngelo?“),

The ideology, which can be called Wokeness as a term of convenience, has solidified. Or ossified, if you prefer. It has morphed into a bizarre post-national ideology, and it has ruled the scene for at-very-least the past decade and perhaps considerably longer. We already do see many “natives” of this ideology in the born-1980s cohorts (including Michelle Wu), and proportionally more still in the born-1990s cohorts. It’s hard to many any judgements quite yet on the born-2000s cohorts, who are the first true decade-level digital-native cohort, whose entire ideological world is unhealthily filtered through “screens,” “Big Data,” the Internet, and the other accoutrements of the infoscape we now have. But an early-guess is that the born-2000s cohorts will produce many more aspirant
Michelle Wu”-types.

Back to Michelle Wu’s origins. We find her raised, throughout childhood, in the Chicago area, to foreigner parents with poor English. She speaks in Chinese to her parents. As a girl, coming of age primarily in the 1990s and into the early 2000s, Michelle Wu gives us the very ‘picture’ of the typical Asian academic-overperformer. I refer here to the kind of person who is yes, “smart,” no doubt, but who tends to reach very-high heights or even “stratospheric”(-seeming) heights. But the “kind “type” to which to which I refer here tends to overshoot his or her true level, reaching social-stations or milestones or institutions that are frankly speaking, above the person’s true value in the “marketplace of ideas” and such things. This is, of course, specifically because of the long-established Asian cultural characteristic of “grind-study.” It’s a bit of an unfair advantage they have in such places as the USA. The various social, economic, and other endeavors with which be busy our lives need good people to function properly and reach levels of excellence for the benefit of all. The mismatch that goes on by the process of sorting jus described will tend to cause distortions.

Michelle Wu was awarded a National Merit Scholar award (including a modest cash-scholarship) in 2003, the year she graduated high-school in suburban Chicago; she had also been a semifinalist for that high academic honor in 2002. Harvard gave her an offer. Michelle Wu went through Harvard for the customary four years. In her father’s youth, Harvard was still not a fully “co-ed” institution, having maintained a traditional male-centricness up until the 1970s, when it finally gave up and merged which the parallel women’s college known as Radcliffe, a process largely completed, “done and dusted” by 1980.

At Harvard, she did what Harvard people always do: networked, hung around with powerful people, absorbed the norms and status-signals for entry into the elite, and curried favor with the big-machine Democratic Party people (which had by this time became practically synonymous with this form of the elite).

Michelle Wu’s first appearance in the Boston Globe newspaper appears to be a November 2006 story in the “Food” section in which she is shown grinning shyly, wearing a Hillary-Clinton-style “pantsuit,” besides two other women (one another East Asian, one apparently Jewish) at an event in which some consultant group was seeking to train Harvard students on how to do things such as eat bread in a professional manner (“Etiquette expert gives job seekers the business,” Boston Globe, Nov. 8, 2006).

It is likely that Michelle Wu was in effect an “early adopter” of Wokeness. She was probably socialized into the core of these values and this worldview in the 1990s and early 2000s, in the deep-blue Chicago area. She was galvanized by her status as “oppressed minority woman,” which people told her was a big deal. Unlike White-Christian women in similar circumstances and exposed to similar talk, Michelle Wu’s instincts told her to pounce and ride to power, to use the ideology to some extent “instrumentally.” That she has done, in part. But it also seems the ideology overtook her, at least in part. It tends to work that way.

At Harvard, Michelle Wu is said to have “led the Phillips Brooks House Association’s Chinatown Citizenship Program, which provides support and classes for Chinatown immigrants in the naturalization process” (“Boston Mayor Michelle Wu ’07 to Address Harvard College Class of 2022 on Class Day,” Harvard Crimson, April 2022). An interesting choice of what to do with one’s free time. Especially illuminating for us now, as we ponder what, exactly, she had in mind with her comment that “every person, every human being, has the legal right to come to the United States and seek asylum…”

One can also put the matter of Michelle Wu’s ideological-development (such as it is) in this way: When arriving at Harvard, back there ca. late August 2003 as an incoming first-year student, she lacked any alternative world-view or rooted identity upon which to base a self-image, other than that of “immigrant” and maybe something vaguely like “oppressed woman of color.” And so she went along fully with “things,” with that which seemed to be the powerful position(s). She adopted the taboos and shibboleths of power.

This story, the Michelle Wu implausible “entree” into the U.S.-elite via Harvard in the mid-2000s, also contrasts with Ron DeSantis’ experience of going through Yale some years earlier. DeSantis had arrived at Yale already with a largely-preformed worldview and family-based identity, seeing himself as part of the U.S. story. He was a political conservative throughout his time at Yale. (See: “Son of Florida, Grandson of industrial-Ohio, great-grandson of Italy: The ancestry of Ron DeSantis“.)

College-admissions policies in our time are designed specifically to minimize the number of “Ron DeSantises” (White males with potential alternate identities or aspirations non-aligned with the new power-elite and its class-values), and increase the number of “Michelle Wu”-like students who readily absorb the values, and indeed have little choice but to do so (and this is especially true for the non-Asians, for appearances sake; but that’s mainly just because it gets embarrassing, a bit, if Asians who are experts at test-taking numerically dominate an elite institution).

In other words, the Regime really likes people like Michelle Wu. This is a key thing to understand about her whole story and political-background, and which, in a single line, explains how she was groomed for power already in her twenties: She was elected to the Boston City Council at twenty-eight (2013). This after nestling besides the fires of Big Blue political machine throughout her twenties, via Harvard and via other institutional power-brokers, including support from left-wing Jewish organizations in the region.

After a May 2007 graduation from Harvard, with a degree in Economics, Michelle Wu was on the power-track and sliding into a high-paid “consulting job” in Boston. She held a consultancy job (in Boston’s financial district) for less than a year. That kind of work was presumably too small a pond for her, to say nothing of being high-wired and stressful and sometimes thankless. These “consulting” jobs, it must be understood, are waters in which aspirant- and actual-elites regularly swim, especially early in their “careers.” They are well-networked stepping-stones, for many. This includes the likes of Pete Buttigieg, who was at McKinsey Consulting’s office in Chicago from 2007 to 2010, age 25 to 28.

Michelle Wu in 2008 returned “home” to Chicago to care for her mother, who had long since divorced her father, was living alone, and was said to be displaying signs of mental illness. This according to an Oct. 2013 profile in the Boston Globe of how great then-D-team-machine-candidate Michelle Wu was. It was based on a personal interview with Michelle Wu. (See: Farah Stockman, “Cut red tape; let eateries revive neighborhoods,” Boston Globe, Oct. 29, 2013). Michelle Wu has arranged for her boyfriend to transfer from his banking job and she spent a year setting up and running a cute cafe. It was the sort of cafe which, in those days, would have been classified as being of the “SWPL” type. The name was “Loose Leaf Tea-Loft.” Information on Google suggests the place “closed permanently” in July 2009, succeeded by another cafe. A surviving Google review for Loose Leaf Tea-Loft, from 2009, has this: “The tea’s and coffee’s are great ~ taste great with variety. And the food is a unique ethnic fusion.”

The intention with Michelle Wu’s 2008 “cute-cafe founding” idea was to get it going and then hand it over to her mother to run, to keep her occupied and happy. Where she got the seed-money from to set up a new cafe is uncertain. But she did it. Per the Boston Globe report, Michelle Wu then “sold” the cafe to return to Boston, where she had her eye on entering law-school (in other words, she was already thinking of a political career even then). To say that she “sold” the cafe suggests she had owned it outright. A sympathetic profile of her cafe in the pages of the Chicago Tribune also calls Michelle Wu the “owner” (Chicago Tribune, Sunday Feb. 15, 2009, Section 9, “Nine things you should unlearn about tea”).

Well, Michelle Wu, at age twenty-three or so, founded and “owned” a cafe. Her little cafe made appearances in Chicago’s biggest newspaper. How was this? It was hardly notable on its own merits among thousands of others in Greater Chicago, most of them unprofiled. Interesting. These are all more little clues that she had money and means from the very start — even in her early twenties. That in addition to elite-connections that was always cultivating. None of this never hurts. Nor does it hurt to have an aspiring-investment-banker boyfriend-turned-husband, which she also had.

Returning to Boston, by 2010 she had secured a slot at Harvard Law School, and a nice resume-padding positions in both summer 2010 and summer 2011 at, none other than, Boston City Hall. Yes, that’s the very same Boston City Hall that she now nominally controls as mayor. Michelle Wu therefore entered the realm of highest-level Boston politics already by 2010, age twenty-five. She had hardly done anything in life yet. Her entry into Harvard Law, after her return from Chicago, knotted things up. Her J.D. degree, taken in 2012, was practically a formality. Within months she had launched her campaign for city-council.

Signs point to Michelle Wu being promoted up the ladder rapidly in the period 2010 to 2012. The latter was the Obama re-election year, rallying the D-team faithful all ’round. Soon after the Obama election and Elizabeth Warren election to the U.S. Senate (on that, more shortly), Michelle Wu announced she was running for Boston city-council. She had then-recently turned twenty-eight. Soon after her announcement that was running for city-council, her campaign coffers were mysteriously full. “First-time candidates often struggle to raise money,” a Boston Globe reporter wrote, reporting on candidates’ December-2012 fundraising, “and Wu’s early [fundraising] prowess suggests she could be a legitimate force” (“Connolly raises $68,000,” Boston Globe, Jan. 17, 2013).

Michelle Wu was well-embedded in the machine-politics of Boston before her decision to run for city council. She had percolated up, through contacts, through aggressive networking, through the great-and-strange power in the USA of cute-Asian-girl charm, and through all-around savvy, over the period ca. late-2003 to late-2012. For most of this period she was at Harvard itself: BA for four years; JD for two years; and other ties to the periphery and network, as with her consultancy job and her internships. She is an almost-total product of “the system.”

In her election to the city-council in November 2013, she was along a slate of candidates including current Black-Power U.S. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. She caused an early controversy in 2013-15 by siding with a “machine-politics” figure of the old Irish-Catholic type named Bill Linehan (b.1950), which some characterized at the time as representing her siding with the machine at the expense of “progressive ideology” (or the moral-imperative of Wokeness, as people in the early 2020s might think of it).

Michelle Wu was a “made woman” by her mid-twenties (if not earlier!), at the cusp of her Boston political career.

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Starting in 2013, Michelle Wu came to be a pet-project of Senator Elizabeth Warren, for uncertain reasons. Warren, of course, had presidential aspirations, which would come to the fore within a few years. Or at least major-cabinet-position aspirations. Elizabeth Warren ran a fairly-strong campaign in 2019-20, before dropping out to crown Biden the D-machine nominee.

To what do we attribute Warren championing the unknown and obscure cute-Asian-Harvard-girl candidate Michelle Wu in 2013? The elder White woman, Warren, was likely seeking to boost her Diversity credentials ahead of a presidential run. There is surely “more to it” than that. But that factor still might have been decisive. Put it this way: all else equal, Elizabeth Warren probably would not have championed an otherwise-identical White-male named Michael Wurthington with the same ideas and qualifications and everything else.

It also helped that Michelle Wu worked on Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 campaign. Recall that she had graduated with a law degree inMay 2012. Then within a few months we find her working for the Elizabeth Warren for Senate campaign. Did Michelle Wu ever happen to find time to, umm, “practice law”? Not much, it would seem. Oh, and ask not what Michelle Wu did for the Elizabeth Warren campaign. For you already know the answer: She ran “statewide outreach to communities of color” on behalf of the effort to elect Elizabeth Warren. This kind of outreach may actually have been decisive in 2012, the Obama re-election year (and is characteristic of the new-elite and its moral-imperatives; one hears the tone of moral-superiority when one hears such a thing as “outreach to communities of color”).

The unpopular Elizabeth Warren’s’ victory was hardly a sure-thing, even in solid-Democrat Massachusetts. In the end, she only narrowly defeated popular Republican Scott Brown (54%-46%) [cf. 2020 presidential result: 66%-32% for Biden]. Scott Brown is a colonial-stock White-Protestant. Elizabeth Warren at the time claimed to have substantial Amerind ancestry.

Throughout the 2010s, anyway, Michelle Wu had a golden-ticket to the top. After repeatedly being a favorite of the D-machine in Boston and re-elected several times to the city council, it was not much of a surprise when Boston’s D-team-block-voting electorate delivered the mayoralty to her in November 2021. We should stress the point again: Michelle Wu is a machine-politics figure. Her act of Hey-I’m-a-cute-Asian-girl “bubbleheaded” presentation, which one senses she has used to her advantage all throughout her rise to power and influence, clashes with the very idea of what a “machine politician” has traditionally meant. But it’s the machine nonetheless, and despite appearances it is again a lesson for us on “what the elite is.”

With support from Elizabeth Warren and her other positives in that political world, she was shuffled up the ladder to be president of the Boston City Council (2016-2018), hailed by the Democratic establishment and by the Boston Globe for her “historic ascendancy” to that office “as the first Asian-American and the first woman of color to hold that post” (“Michelle Wu,” Boston Globe, Jan. 24, 2016, A4).

Recall, again, that she had had very little actual political experience or any kind of experience. She had turned thirty-one and had taken half-duties for a while after the birth of her first child in Dec. 2014. Her appointment to the presidency of the council was secured in the period November to December 2015. That was as U.S. politics was already in uproar over the appearance of a non-approved clown with his outrageous orange hair who cavalierly broke taboos and demanded unified resistance and pro-Diversity statements. The spirit of the day among this section of the elite was as the confusingly-worded slogan of the day had it: “Love Trumps Hate.” It was a slogan that got a big boost right in December 2015 when Hillary Clinton tweeted it. (See: “Wu says she has the votes to be the next City Council president,” Boston Globe, Nov. 14, 2015.)

Let’s look again at what Michelle said about U.S. demographic-and-nationality policy, which she gave as a kind of statement-of-faith:

“Every person, every human being, has the legal right to come to the United States and seek asylum, or shelter. Those policies have been in place for a long time…”

If taken literally, this is an outrageous or even preposterous statement, sloppy thinking from someone supposedly educated in economics. But it is also a normal sort of virtue-signal among her class. It is a Wokeness imperative. It is normal-seeming to those who move in her circles. Many of recent-immigrant-stock elites like her will take it as a statement-of-faith and work towards its goals in order to make themselves and their presence in the host-society seem the more legitimate. That applies even if it undermines the entire society around them and does clear-and-present harm.

That “making oneself seem more legitimate” is another of the big lessons of the case of Michelle Wu. Her cavalier attitude towards “the commons,” the wider society and its norms and informal-institutions, may be a subtle form of political-social autism (or “cluelessness”), but, if so, that “political-social autism” just also happens to be a self-serving one for people just like her.

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Michelle Wu has two mixed-race children. Her husband is a White man by name of Conor Pewarski, who went to Yale about the same time as Michelle Wu went to Harvard. At the time of Michelle Wu’s rise to political-power, beginning in the early-mid 2010s, Conor Pewarski was himself chairman of Boston’s “Ward 4 Democratic Committee,” also an interesting slot to be occupied by someone then-still in his twenties. How it happened that he came to occupy that spot can only be guessed at. One guesses there may be something more to the story than “he was just so skilled at politics and so smart, and beloved, that they made him chairman” in a machine-political environment.

One report on the Internet claims that Conor Pewarski is of paternal Polish-ancestral origin and Irish-Catholic origin on the maternal side. This would help, given the degree to which the Irish-Catholics have had political power in Boston since they took over the city’s politics from its Protestant founders some generations ago now. But this is an old-line of political analysis, quite suited to the 19th and 20th centuries and maybe still echoing well into the 21st century but not sufficient at all (of course) to explain something like the phenomenon of Michelle Wu’s implausible political career, and her devotion to radical principles of national-dispossession.

Given Michelle Wu’s biography as we know it, the story of how she met her husband is also not surprising. It is said that the two, Michelle Wu and Conor Pewarski, were introduced to one another during one of the annual Harvard-Yale football games in the mid-2000s. (Intercollegiate sports: another old institution that was once the province of the elite White-Protestant males who developed the sport of American-football in the late 19th century.)

Michelle Wu’s marriage could be seen as a typical power-aspirant marriage, or elite-networking of a kind that her Asian relatives and mother would have encouraged to claw into position of the elite, lest one get stuck dumped onto a faceless, sunburned, rice-farming labor-pool. (That extreme kind of view is not our tradition, with our middle-class-everyone-wins ethics; but it is theirs.) But for our purposes, though, the important thing may be the mixed-race children involved.

The two young children of Michelle Wu, if in a traditional society, be it Asian or European, would be in the usual (and ‘classic’) “Tragic Mulatto” dilemma. But under Wokeness, under an ideology of constant-population-flux ideology, “anything goes”; they can be core-society elites and even members of a hereditary neo-Establishment just as well.

Michelle Wu is, therefore, likely committed to “the ideology” for a wide range of reasons, and is personally invested in it to a great degree. As I already said, the Regime loves people like this because they are some combination of pliable and enthusiastic on its behalf and often cannot even conceive of another way or another sort of regime or ordering-structure than the one that treats them like its pets.

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At Harvard, Michelle Wu overlapped with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, although for less than one year, namely the 2003-04 academic year. Zuckerberg, who was one year ahead of Michelle Wu, dropped out sometime during that year to go full-time with the Facebook project.

Two other things that Zuckerberg and Michelle Wu share is involvement in a “White-male, East-Asian female” pairings and mixed-race children. For Zuckerberg is married to one Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg’s Asian wife is, exactly like Michelle Wu, born in 1985 to Sinosphere-origin parents.

An obvious difference is that Zuckerberg is considerably wealthier, indeed a major power-baron for most of the past twenty years; and of course Zuckerberg is of Jewish origin (of Eastern-European-Jewish, Ellis Island-era Jewish stock), unlike Michelle Wu’s husband who is apparently of Christian (probably ethnic-Catholic) origin. But all the children will share a class consciousness. They are actual-elites, or will be actual-elites when they age into maturity in the mid-21st century, and they will consciously see themselves as such. They will likely inherit Michelle Wu’s own statements-of-ideological faith, as a way to shore-up their own multi-racial identities and legitimacy in a Western, White-Christian-origin society.

The presence of both Chan and Wu in the USA is a direct result of immigration-policy during the 1970s and 1980s. A geopolitical parallel is that both immigration-tracks involved U.S. foreign policy hotspots: Wu’s Taiwan and Chan’s Vietnam (the latter’s parents being ethnic-Chinese who got on the refugee gravy-train some years after the Vietnam War and slid into nice U.S. residence visas).

There are still more parallels between Priscilla Chan and Michelle Wu and their places in things and what they meant for U.S. sociosexual-political culture, which could be discussed for more paragraphs, but I will leave it at one more remarkable ‘personal’ parallel:

Priscilla Chan grew up in a wealthy-suburb of Boston named Quincy, whose White population has been steadily displaced by Asian immigrants. The striking parallels with these neo-elites and their stories, virtually none of whom have ties to the traditional U.S. elite or the founding and culture-shaping element of the population (on which, more shortly), cannot be dismissed or ignored.

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With a lot of insights having already been had into our subject, Michelle Wu and her political career, I conclude again with a look at her remarks:

“Every person, every human being, has the legal right to come to the United States and seek asylum, or shelter. Those policies have been in place for a long time…” […] They are looking to work, looking to contribute, looking to be in a safe democracy where they can raise their families. […] [We are trying to] ‘triage’ the situation, to create temporary housing so that families can get settled…”

There is more than just elite rhetoric that is of interest here. There is elite ideology.

But it’s also not just “ideology.” It’s really elite class-consciousness. I have substantially sketched out some important elements of this new class as seen through the life and work of Michelle Wu.

The new class, the new elite, has substantial White-Christian elements in it (for the USA has a traditional large-White-Christian supermajority, so it could be little other way). But even so this new class, the new broad elite, is post-White and post-American as such.

It is elite moral-imperatives that Michelle Wu is expressing. A strange system of morality it is, one which is clearly based in “elite-diasporic ethics,” a phrase I take from the political-philosopher Curt Doolittle to define this kind of phenomenon. (Doolittle is himself a New Englander and will well recognize the phenomena at play with the Michelle Wu case.)

Michelle Wu is an “Asian,” but she is not a representative of East-Asians. What she is, is a representative of this new class, this new elite. It is an elite which has various components but shares important visions; an elite which is well-networked amongst itself; an elite which is highly politically galvanized and even radical in the pursuit of its ideological agenda (not all elites are always so ‘ideological’ or radical or disciplined); an elite that is ‘political’ in Carl Schmitt’s sense, which means having identified an enemy. That “class enemy,” to be direct about it, White-Christian Middle America as a group, serving a kind of domestic internal-rival or even internal-enemy, or at the least thought of in such way as committed hard-leftists used to speak of the “bourgeois.”

The “new class” is one that is at-once highly conscious of itself but without a name. Its various components are tied together in coalition and not through pre-existing ties. The coalition certainly includes the descendants of the Eastern-European Jews. That group began arriving in the USA in the mid-1880s and, by about a century later, it had evolved into a mature, and self-conscious transnational elite partly tied to the United States in that it was heavily reliant on U.S. power. That group’s model is the frame into which aspirant elites of recent decades, like the young Michelle Wu back in the 2000s (or even earlier in her 1990s childhood!), would have stepped into and seen themselves as part of in many ways.

The politics of this new class are actually highly class-conscious. It is seldom discussed in such terms, but these people are highly class-conscious and have contempt for people they see as members of rival classes. Michelle Wu is an exemplar of the new elite class in all kinds of ways.

The ideological program of the new class, the new elite, is based upon and reinforced by shared values. But the values are not formal ones as set out, for example, in some religious text, or in some political-philosopher’s text. The new values are a kind often-written about in commentaries that were beginning to be commonly seen by ca. 2000. By that time, this class had emerged basically fully formed, although not yet so bold or confident of itself, as it was by ca. 2020.

Importantly, and to stress again, the new class para-national or trans-national. I refer to the idea, often cited by the sharp observer Dieter Kief, of the “Anywhere” meta-class against the old “Somewhere” meta-class. In important ways, our object of study here, Michelle Wu, is both highly class-conscious and a distinct member of the “Anywhere” class, despite long ties to the city of Boston. Note well: The source of her “ties” to Boston is solely that she went to Harvard. She was no other ties to the city. She has no family from there, for example, nor even any personal ties before college. And the local political-machine shuffled her up the ladder the mayoralty!

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Michelle Wu and the composition of the U.S. elite and “Establishment”

This study of the life and political-career of one “Michelle Wu, Mayor of Boston” has also been a little miniature-study in elite composition. Implied throughout is that someone of such name and personal-origin as Michelle Wu is an implausible figure to be such as mayor of a city such as Boston. But it actually fits well with facts-on-the-ground.

A comprehensive new study of the U.S. elite is called for. Academics are likely reluctant to want to do such a thing because taboos are at hand. Why? The new class does not like itself to be named. It often does not even think of itself as a class, but rather just as “the good people.” (Every class-consciousness in history involves an emergent or established class thinking of itself as a morally superior to others.)

In the mid-20th century, we got several classic studies of the U.S. elite. This kind of study practically constituted a mini-genre of their own. They continued into the 1970s or so, before falling away. We don’t see any serious books of this kind anymore, the territory ceded to self-censorship and a occasional crackpottery awkwardly filling some of the void (“the elite are satanic baby-sacrificers,” etc.).

The classic studies of the elite generally posit something of a solid through-line, of a core of an American elite back to the foundational days of “American civilization” in the 16th to 18th centuries. (Yes, starting even in the 16th century, before there were even successful permanent European colonies as such. Classic-America, and its “heroic-age” founding-period, is clearly based on certain Protestant-Christian strains coming out of Northwestern Europe. The formative elements involved, emerging from the Middle Ages in Europe and into the modern age, continued their historical drama on the new stage of the North American continent for many generations to come.).

Many of the studies of the U.S. elite, to which I refer, began to take major notice of the apple-cart-overturning aspect of the rise of the Eastern-European Jews within the U.S. elite. The Eastern-European Jews were an aspirant rival, who had already achieved much but as of the mid-20th century were not able to fully displace the traditional elite (the “Protestant Establishment”). To an extent they also took notice of the Catholics, who, while often achieving power, were not considered to be true members of the elite. Ethnic-Catholics were not, usually, members of a norm-setting, magnanimous, historically-momentous, formational, patriarchal social-elite or “Establishment.” In some of these studies, the question of Ellis-Island-era Catholics’ descendants merging into the elite was no easy one to solve (and echoes of its partial failure still reverberate even now).

But it was rise of the Jews as aspirant elites that emerged as the biggest theme. There was serious White-Protestant resistance to fully “accepting” the Jews, or an inability to integrate with them for this-or-that reason, and how to deal with this or handle it was a cause for concern. By the middle decades of the 20th century, the rise of the Jews within the U.S. elite was hardly ignorable, but it was also not necessarily yet a taboo.

The rise of the Jews in the United States was a major theme of one of the great classic studies of the matter, a book that was (ironically?) titled The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (1963), by Professor E. Digby Baltzell [1915-1996]. Baltzell’s study and commentary reflects the thinking of the 1930s-1950s, the period when he slowly devised what eventually became his structural theory of how the U.S. elite and “Establishment” work. Any “elite” is always changing, so any firm sociological theory needs to account for changes and shifts and how they happen and so on.

Such sorts of mid-20th-century talk of elites or of a power-“Establishment” (capitalized in Baltzell’s technical usage) is all as a dark-ages period of nefarious pre-history for people like Michelle Wu. By “people like” her I really mean ideologically-pliant clean-slaters who seek to curry favor with the current elite. The kind of people I mean, the younger ones, will have some awareness, maybe, of the 1980s or 1990s. But anything much beyond that and it’s “mean-old dead white males” territory, with the usual laundry-list of exaggerated and often-imaginary negatives. Maybe some of the sorts of people I mean do even “know better,” in their heads; but they hold fast to the villainization-of-the-past narrative “at heart,” at least. For it pays, it is the consensus view of their class, and it is self-serving and self-legitimizing.

The Protestant Establishment book is of great historical value, even read in the 2020s (and will be for many years to come). It proposes a system of elites and elite entry by non-elites, and distinguishes it from a so-called Establishment. The Establishment are agenda-setting and norm-enforcing social elites who oversee a larger system. There are always other elites in the economic or political realms. The jockeying for status by different constituent groups within society often defines its politics and even cultural trends, is a theme of the book.

Professor Baltzell’s framework of elite entry may be of some value for understanding the strange case of Michelle Wu. Except for one important thing: Baltzell says nothing really at all about (or even predictive of) the rise of miscellaneous-Diversity-Elites like Michelle Wu.

The steady and ongoing rise of “Michelle Wu-like people” into the U.S. elite — not just well-networked and grinning Asian females of relatively-recent foreign origin, but certainly encompassing them — is a phenomenon that is easily-recognizable today. Today, in the time of Baltzell’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But Baltzell was observing, thinking, and developing about his sociological theories back in the 1940s and 1950s. Those were years well before the start of the USA’s shockingly-loose global immigration policy. He was writing while the immigration-restriction regime was in place (1910s to 1960s), widely popular, and seen as a stabilizing force.

The new-order of things, which begins in/by the 1970s, in time produced such things as the absurd “Diversity Visa,” an at-least-symbolically-crazy program which no president so far has had the courage to close down. The new-order also produced people like Michelle Wu, saying “Every person, every human being, has the legal right to come to the United States and seek asylum,” and seeming to believe it is the foundation-stone of everything about the United States, a holy-of-holies.

Baltzell could hardly have conceived of a world in which the traditional U.S. elite would have apparently collapsed, not really in a way that yielded what we now have. It would practically have seemed to him, ca.1960, as like sci-fi, like the vision of the 2020s that we in the Blade Runner movie of the 1980s, dark and dreary and depressing and foreign. A lot of negative consequences that have followed that were largely outside the bounds of Baltzell’s scenario-gaming that he did in his great study.

The traditional “Protestant Establishment,” about which Baltzell wrote, was quite a good elite, all told. Not perfect, but not vicious or malicious or dedicated to the destruction of the commons around it. The old order was, basically, good for the whole society, optimistic and magnanimous (as far as elites go),even too a way that is “weird.” I use that latter term as a pun, in a nod to a sociological term that emerged in the 2010s: “W.E.I.R.D.”, Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic. Part of the secret of Western greatness and success and uniqueness is the existence of good elites, or weak and dispersed elites, semi-open elites.

Michelle Wu’s ancestors, being all from the Sinosphere, had no part even in the centuries-long saga out of which the United States and other forms of Western political-culture, and so on, were born and evolved. To the proverbial Martian-anthropologist, it would be a genuine surprise and mystery “how Michelle Wu happened.” How could someone like this — a foreign-origin female of an entirely different population-stock than the core-population of the host-society — simply “walk into” the elite and reach considerable heights of power? And do so even well before age thirty, without having apparently done much of anything yet in life beyond mingle on the margins of elite and flash grins and excude cuteness and a variant of cool-minority-status at people?

The answer lies to this puzzle is there to be found, and we have discussed it in this essay. A new class has emerged, from which is drawn a new elite, which is an expression of this new class. The Regime that is propped up, staffed, “run”, and supported by this new elite exists. But unlike elites of many past societies, it does not overtly identify itself as with aristocratic titles or the like. And the Regime, by the way, really loves people like Michelle Wu; truly, it does.

This talk of “elite ideology” and “elite composition” is not merely academic. The questions involved could, and should, be studied academically, of course, but the questions are not “merely” academic. They are also matters of relevance to the demographic-national question in the USA, as we approach the mid-21st century. This is really to say: the destiny of North America, and really of the whole Western world at the least.

The established elites within early-21st-century U.S. society have a very different vision of the good society than that held by most of the people, the core-population over whom they rule. You see it on display in occasional overfly-frank comments as in Michelle Wu’s comment that everyone in the world — or “every human being,” as she put it — “has the right to come” to come and live in the United States, at public expense if necessary. A moral-imperative is at stake, and class-consciousness demands sacrifices to these particular gods. Her comments easily provoke most White-Christians in America to anger, and these comments have circulated on social-media with tens of thousands of hostile comments. But the anger is, as usual, unfocused.

What is the solution? Whence comes our deliverance?

The old joke applies: “With friends like this, who needs enemies?” Amend that to: “With an elite like this, who needs enemies?”

Every society has an elite. Some elite. If a system is locked in place through all kinds of internal mechanisms, if it is stable, then it can only be an alternate elite that makes changes. Call it, if you must, a “dissident elite.” Whatever it be called, it must be a group of men aware of the situation and who possess the courage to challenge it. This requires serious clarity of moral-purpose and not just flashy talk. The demagogues, inevitable as they are, will generally not be helpful to actual solutions. They are highly tempting to the demoralized and dispossessed. But the actual solution is a separate elite and a class-consciousness of our own. It is our destiny.

It is out destiny to, one day, look back in awe that cases like Michelle Wu were possible as groomed into major “political leaders.” Michelle Wu, with her bold post-national and triumphalistic attitudes about the illegitimacy of the American people. It’s not something that will stand the test of time.

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[End.]